Cross Purposes in the Libertarian Party

Education or Electoral Strategy? Experience
Shows: Neither!

Many times the question has been raised whether LP should
pursue a strategy aimed exclusively at winning or affecting elections, or one
aimed at propagandizing and educating without much regard to elections, or
mostly one or the other of those, or an equal or flexible mix depending on
circumstances. But the question of what should be pursued needs to be assessed
in light of the realities of what will be pursued, as I do here. I
answer "neither" above, not to indicate that neither strategy has been or will
be pursued, but to say that neither will be pursued efficiently or done well, because each such orientation gets in the
way of the other.

But first let's get out of the way the question of
whether LP does, or should, really have some other primary purpose. It does also
provide an outlet for socialization and blowing off steam. It's inevitable that
an organization of its kind will serve such purposes, and those are benign.
However, it should be obvious that an organization with "Party" in its name,
despite the other meaning of the word, should not be geared primarily for such
purposes, and that it becomes wasteful to the extent those take up too much of
its time. The social and steam-blowing purpose is best suited to SIL (now ISIL)
and other organizations such as ISI and the Eris Society.

Unfortunately
the LP got organized and was around for some time before its uselessness became
manifest. Some of us needed more evidence than others, who made that judgement
years before me. In the meantime, LP grew very big as grass roots libertarian
minded organizations go, so it has become the default place to go for radical
libertarians to meet and/or hear from other radical libertarians. So as a social
club, it's succeeded, at the expense of other organizations whose growth was
stunted thereby, or which could have organized in the absence of LP. That
situation need not continue, but it's important for enough people to get the
message that LP is dead for a competitor to get far off the ground.

(We
see here an unfortunate result of path dependence. LP is far from the ideal
organization for people to socialize, commiserate, etc. in, and it's very
inefficient, as I show here, for other purposes. However, it's just good enough
as a social club, and there's positive feedback in that scale builds on itself
there (the more people you have, the easier it is to get or retain them, because
otherwise they'd have to start from scratch), that it has sustained itself for a
long time at the expense of better organizations which would probably have
formed in its absence.)

So let's consider first LP as a propaganda-education vehicle. (I'll use
the abbreviation "edu-prop".) Does it make sense for a small political party to
assume such a role, when such propaganda could be undertaken via other vehicles?
Why should it, when there are so many handicaps to such a vehicle?

One
handicap is the negative stigma of politics. There's a built-in negative
reaction to politicians. People tend to see politicians and their organizations
as self-serving, and tend to distrust what they say. Basically they suspect
politicians and their organizations of lying or distorting or selectively
presenting facts to aggrandize themselves. They're right, of course. All
politicians must do this, libertarians being no exception, to succeed, and
therefore always operate with this handicap. But why should someone or some
group of persons oriented toward edu-prop electively handicap themselves that
way? This handicap is particularly vexing for libertarian activists, because
radical libertarians, and even persons with greater than average libertarian
leanings, i.e. the persons who should be most interested in and susceptible to
libertarian messages, tend to have greater than average suspicion about
politicians. Approaching them with edu-prop in the form of a political campaign
or organization is an especially bad idea.

There are frequently also
institutional barriers because of the negative stigma of politics, and
particularly of political parties. Many community organizations and other
organizations have either an official or unofficial policy of non-partisanship.
20 years ago while in charge for the Bronx of the Libertarian Speakers Bureau (a
function of LPNYC), I found it was like pulling teeth to get speaking
engagements for our people. Yes, shortly before an election some organizations
might have a Candidate's Night, but the tradeoff of gaining these speaking
opportunities (for candidates for public office only) at the expense of losing a
great many others was not a good one. Sure, we could form front groups with
names not reflecting a political affiliation, but that pretty much concedes the
party affiliation is a handicap, not a bonus.

How about the opportunity
to do political advertising? It's true that in broadcast media, you can
sometimes get a better deal, dollarwise, with campaign ads than with other ads,
because of the law that requires them to give you the best deal. However, that
opportunity exists only in a fairly narrow window close to Election Day, and
often political ad space is rationed by a broadcast station. Yes, being a
candidate on the ballot is a form of advertising, but the ballot has no edu-prop
value at all, it's just a listing. Sometimes you get the benefit of a booklet
prepared by the election apparatus including candidates' blurbs; there are also
private organizations with such brochures online or in print. But political
advertising has a very short shelf life compared to many other examples of
edu-prop.

Besides, the cost of getting on the ballot is a considerable
handicap of its own. This will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but I
suspect that in many this cost far outweighs the benefit to be achieved in terms
of getting one's message out. It is sometimes said (I used to myself, even) that
there are some people who can only be reached in a practical way via a political
campaign. That's true, but these are the people whose attention is most
competitively sought and expensive.

Another handicap has grown large:
LP's reputation as a loser. Losing, and losing big as LP candidates almost always do,
reflects negatively on libertarians in general. This is no more than the
psychology of the restaurant that has only a small clientele vs. the one people
line up to get into. Success is its own advertising, and so is failure. People
in screening ideas for further consideration will frequently employ the tool of
popularity vs. unpopularity. If the numbers reflect that you're not selling,
there must be something wrong with you.

Certainly this is true of
individual politicians; a loss in a single prominent race is often enough to
sink a career, or at least to keep the person from being considered a serious
candidate for that same office in the future. There's the impression that the
candidate had hir shot, and it's time for hir to step aside. This is probably
true to some degree of political parties as well as of politicians. Libertarian
Party nominees get creamed at the polls, so there must be something wrong with
people who label themselves libertarian; it's probably their ideas. At least
that's what many people will think. So the continued electoral failure of the LP
casts libertarian thinking into disrepute, affecting negatively even the
reputations of those who call themselves libertarian yet who have nothing to do
with LP! It's not good for edu-prop if "libertarian" means
"loser".

Politics also imposes the handicap of...politics! A political
organization is tailor made for infighting. Sure, infighting can occur in any organization, but it's practically
mandatory in politics. That gets in the way of edu-prop, because it gets
contested over as well as all the other stakes.

The final handicap of an
ideologic political party to edu-prop is the all-encompassing nature of the
party as opposed to the need for flexibility and compartmentalization. (This
will come up as a handicap of doing politics too.) It's hard for anyone to sell
a piece of the package without selling the whole thing. While some may view that
as a benefit, it's far more likely just to kill the whole sale. Some libertarian
education will surely always be directed at selling the whole package as an
integrated ideology or principle, but not all issues edu-prop should be. It's a
handicap to be trying to promote one issue or another if people then think,
"Well, you think that only because you're a radical libertarian, so I, not
subscribing to that ideology, should just ignore you or at least discount
heavily what you say about this issue." It's a handicap when people who are
turned on to what you, LP propagandist 1, say, are then turned off by what LP
propagandist 2 has to say on another issue. Political parties have platforms and
programs, and nearly everyone finds something strongly objectionable in the
platform or program of a radical ideologic party.

All those handicaps add
up to make just about anything other than LP a better vehicle for libertarian
edu-prop. But what about LP as a vehicle for
politics? Hell, it's a political party, so it better devote a significant
amount of its effort to politics! Oh, sure, you could look up the dictionary
definition of party and point out that it's not officially called the
Libertarian Political Party. LP
could operate like the Revolutionary Communist Party or other non-electoral
organizations with "Party" in their names. But I don't think that's good
advertising.

So politics (which in a democratic republic are oriented
around elections) should be the main focus of LP. But there are too many
handicaps there too, I'm afraid.

The first handicap is inflexibility
again. A large political party (or a smaller non-ideologic one such as the
Independence Party) has enough room for candidates to say very different things
and not be significantly contradicted by each other or by party functionaries or
documents. By "significantly", I mean the contradictions are a substantial
impediment to their campaigns. But the Libertarian Party is too small to hide
such discrepancies. There'll always be somebody pointing to the platform or
somewhere to say, "You can't campaign saying this and be a Libertarian." And the
person pointing that out may be in the LP or outside of it as a critic or the
person being pitched to.

It gets worse. "If you're a Libertarian, even
though you're not mentioning
those things, you must believe
them. So I'm dismissing what you say about these issues, and dismissing your
candidacy as unworthy." Candidates and campaigns need the freedom to tailor
their messages, and to deliberately hide if necessary the full program of their
ideology. It's the same problem mentioned above as an impediment to edu-prop,
but possibly worse.

Another handicap is that the people drawn in to do
edu-prop disdain the pragmatics of politics. Just about evertyhing that makes
politicians and political campaigns successful is looked down on by many LPers
as infra dig. I'll have more to say about this in another essay, because it
takes in many aspects.

The campaign finance and tax laws make it
relatively burdensome/expensive for an edu-prop organization to do politics, or
for a political organization to do non-political edu-prop. They don't make it
much more expensive for a political organization to do a little edu-prop, but
such edu-prop must follow certain political forms which are less efficient. (For
example, there seems to be a problem taking corporate ads for
newsletters.)

Another major handicap is the narrow popular appeal of a
small party such as LP. You may say, that's not a problem with the input
factors, that's an adverse result. However, the two go hand in
hand. It is extremely unlikely that after 30+ years LP's appeal will somehow
broaden.